The Only Thing We Have To Fear...

Coming around the bend on my way home Friday evening, I encountered a fire truck, an ambulance, a police car and a motorcycle cop. They were part of the crowd that had assembled at the top of the hill near my house to watch as a mini bike, or most of a mini bike, was wheeled out of the intersection. The lights on the ambulance came on, and I stopped to let it pull away. Whoever was on the mini bike was probably in about as good a shape, so off they rolled to the nearest emergency room. Still, the crowd waited, boys from down the street ran to join the curious. Once they got to the edge of the first group of bystanders, they were quiet. No one talked. It was all too plain.
Later that night, when it got dark, the commotion from the apartments next door heated up again. There had been a few days of uneasy truce, but somebody's stereo got turned up too loud, or somebody disrespected someone in a way that set all the bad blood back on boil. And I sat there in my living room, feeling the anger like a wave. There was no crossover between the crowd on the hill and the screaming tenants across the fence from me, but I the fear was a shy cousin to the hate that filled the late night air.
As of September 9, there have been ninety-nine homicides in Oakland during 2006. A vast majority of the victims and the suspects in these killings were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. And there's my connection: Living in Oakland, especially for those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, is dangerous. Francis Bacon once wrote, "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark." I get that - and so do the kids on the hill, and the ones next door.